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A few notes about Chroma Key and NAB
I talked to Boris at the show and they said they weren’t spending any time on
making real time previews or accelerate rendering for chroma key filters. And
Ultimatte says they may not even make a Universal version that works with FCP
because Apple changed the way the plug-in filters work and they are having
trouble making their application work with FCP. They have already made a
Universal version of it for use with AVID and it’s being tested now.Seems like the only thing those of us who use chroma keys can look forward to is
a faster Mac and a newer OS, like the 8 core Mac and Leopard, so rendering is faster.One of the things I had hoped to see in the new version of FCP was the
ability to do what Compressor does with render clusters. You still can’t do that
in FCP itself, so rendering the timeline still can only happen on one machine.Dan
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17 Replies
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From what I’ve inferred from the demo of “Color” it seems to me that this new application has the capability of creating a key.
There’s a clip that shows a woman’s blouse being selected as a key color and another clip where a yellow cab in a street scene was keyed for secondary color adjustments.
I don’t know how good that key is. It appears as though you can drag the selection crosshair through an area and Color will build a key based upon that range of tonal values.
Right now I’m using Keylight for chromakey and that works very well. But having another tool available is always welcome.
Dean Sensui — Imagination Media Hawaii
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The key form FinalTouch (now Color) is “ok”.
It works really well with very defined colors in the frame, but if the color you are trying to
pick melts with others, you are pretty much out of luck.The spline custom shape sometimes works really good if you target does not move.
You can motion track the shape, but FT’s tracker is almost unusable and needs keyframing.You will be better using two grades and compositing in Shake (for now). Unless of course,
Apple and the FinalTocuh team fixed the tracking and up-resed the color picker.Stuart Ferreyra
Timecode Multimedia
President
Santa Monica, CA 90025
https://www.timecodemultimedia.com -
Supposedly (so it says in the promo videos), Color’s tracker is now adapted from Shake, but we’ll have to see…
Nonetheless, I’d have to say that keying is work to be done in a compositing package, not an editing one. As soon as you need to do something complicated, you’ll have trouble in Final Cut. It’s tough to get a REALLY good key on just one layer alone.
-Ben
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When you use Boris Continuum, you don’t use just one filter. I use the chroma key,
the matte cleanup, the alpha process (and Apple’s gaussian blur at .01 if needed)
all on the same clip and track. That’s what gives me a key that’s as good as or pretty much as good as Ultimatte. But rendering takes awhile. I put the background on VI and the key clip
on V2. If you are using DV footage, I add the 411 filter from Nattress to the filter mix first.Dan
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Use Shake to pull the best keys.
David
Peace and Love 🙂
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Does Shake have real time preview of chroma keys?
If not, what makes Shake better than Ultimatte or Boris?
And does it render faster then the above?
Could you be a bit more specific than “Shake pulls the best keys”?
You’ve compared it to what?
Timed the renders against what?Dan
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In my experience, you can frequently get away with using a few keying filters on a clip (be it in FCP, AE, Shake…whatever), but it’s not necessarily the BEST key, but may be passable. Complicated keys could require you to slice your layer down the middle and key each side of your frame separately. You may even need to animate masks where a key is not working correctly… these are not tasks I’d like to take on in FCP.
To answer your question though, Shake has two very good keyers included, offers real time composite preview frame by frame of a key (not RT palyback – you need to render a preview for this). You also have a great amount of control and freedom in Shake, and yes, it renders faster.
-Ben
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shame there hasnt been a dramatic improvement to the final cut pro keyer
this software looks pretty good and uses FXplux and is nodal based 32 bit keyer
https://www.dvgarage.com/prod/prod.php?prod=conduit15anyone used
sounds very interesting.
– – – – – – – – –
Check my podcast at https://cowcast.creativecow.net/final_cut_pro/index.html
or my site at
https://www.benscottarts.co.uk/ – – – – – – – – – -
Thanks for posting that. I’ll try their demo.
I’m also interested in trying Shake, although there isn’t a demo for it.Dan
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I was looking at conduit earlier this year, and it looks as if it makes it possible to access Quartz composer from within Motion. It looked less flexible than Shake and somehow more confusing to use… at least to me. Cool idea, but just not quite where I’d like it to be in terms of usability.
I love Shake, but I’m at best a novice with it. I’m very happy to see some more advanced features movie into FCS2 with GUIs that make them more accessible.
Just my thoughts,
ZakZak
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